Let me tell you a story about SEO
And how important it is to align sales and marketing, make them communicate and basically create an open information environment in the office.
It all started when I was talking with a client about his SEO
We were discussing potential SEO techniques and implementations around his brand new website.
Some of the issues that came up were about the high number of resellers, just like him, who were working in the same area of Veneto, Italy, and were trying to achieve the highly coveted first position in the Google SERP.
Needless to say that his being a new website already has the losing point of being new and therefore other websites, who were older and had already gained some trust from Google, had the upper hand.
We had our work cut out for us and we needed to really bake our noodle in order to come up with original, faster growing SEO solutions.
The questions arise
This is when I started asking him questions so that I could see what we had to work with.
Some of my questions were:
- What makes your company proud?
- What makes you proud of your company?
- Give me one major issue you have in your line of work.
- Tell me about something you know you do better than anyone else.
- Do you know what people are saying about you?
- Do you know what people are saying about your products?
- Do you have any idea what people are saying about your competition?
At this point he started mentioning his sales department again and again, saying that most of the time they pass on the phone with clients was spent talking about products, and not necessarily making a sale.
That was also something he knew people appreciated, because his sales department was very informed about product info and clients liked receiving sincere advice and not a sales pitch.
As Kylee Lessard said in her article about aligning the sales and marketing departments:
“By sharing these insights about behaviors, preferences, interests, pains, and even opinions, both teams are positioned to better identify and engage the most promising potential customers”
Taking this into consideration, I have started asking my client about what the sales team learns from clients and about clients, and whether they document it somehow using a CRM or something similar.
The Eureka moment
A keyword that popped out of that conversation was “Bio-Adhesive”, which doesn’t exist in their portfolio. It’s a mispronunciation of “Bi-Adhesive” being a double-sided sticky tape (in Italian: bioadesivo instead of biadesivo).
That’s when I reminded them how important it is to show a human element in their outbound digital communication, and how humor is the best way to do it.
Working on their blog content, we then decided to write an April Fool’s article and product page about a brand new Bio-Adhesive, using the latest biological technology.
That way, when clients actually search for “Bio-Adhesive”, they’d actually stumble upon a real article, mentioning in the end that the real product is called “Bi-Adhesive” and that it was a joke.
Have you employed a similar strategy into your digital marketing efforts? Let us know in the comments!
